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For awhile now, Riot Games has been treating League of Legends players with an occasional mod that’s available for a short time. We’ve seen multiple mods emerge and disappear over time, including modes that allowed you to fill up Summoner’s Rift with 10 players controlling the same champion (similarly to DOTA’s mirror mode), a 6v6 Summoner’s Rift mode allowing you to perform hexakills or a 1v1 mode. April’s Fools or not, Riot has just released the Ultra-Rapid-Fire mode to League of Legends live servers, a mod that as unbalanced as it may be, has proven to be extremely popular among the community.

The premise of the mod is simple. Everything is faster. Taking place on the regular 5v5 map, the mode changes the name of the game by significantly decreasing cooldowns, providing movement speed boosts or eliminating mana costs on skills. This means you can spam skills endlessly almost twice as fast. The result? An extremely fast-pace and frantic game mode that can be both infuriatingly frustrating (good luck dodging the minigun-like Nidalee spears) or hilarious (don’t walk into the brush when playing against Maokai). While League of Legends is generally well balanced (not counting ARAM), Ultra-Rapid-Fire is anything but. There are obviously extremely strong champions on this mod (Soraka, Sona, Draven, Nidalee, Lux, Zed, Teemo, Leona, etc.) while other champions benefit a lot less from the enhanced stats.

That being said, players love it. The only problem with this League of Legends mod is that it will soon be gone, in typical Riot fashion. So far, every new mod they released publicly was taken down after a few days or weeks, as Riot is testing multiple mods to perhaps one day add them permanently to the game. No mod has enjoyed the level of popularity of Ultra-Rapid-Fire has though, and LoL players have even started petitions to get Riot to keep the mode online indefinitely. There’s just something hidden in the mod that keeps you coming back to it over and over again. Had a hard day of defeats in Ranked games? No worries, boot up Ultra-Rapid-Fire and spray your opponents with a barrage of Lux ultimates to take the pressure off.

Despite this, Riot will surely be taking the mode down in a few days. The decision is not easy to understand, as players don’t expect the team behind League of Legends to balance it out. It is what it is, and people are fine with it. Why not let players have it then? Would it cost Riot that many resources to keep it going? Sure, some additional QA work would be required to keep the mode bug and crash-free, but other than that, we see no reason why it shouldn’t be around. If you haven’t tried out Ultra-Rapid-Fire yet, you’d best hurry up, as it’s not going to be here for long. Here’s the change-log for the new mode: